No cover for politicians in a sports shirt

For the first half of the 20th century the language of Irish politics was dominated by the vocabulary of nationhood: freedom, independence, republic, sovereignty, distinctiveness. For most of the second half the language was that of economics: growth, productivity, investment, income, fiscal rectitude.

For a while, in the 1980s and 1990s, when abortion became the ideological battleground, there was an infusion of medical and gynaecological terms: ectopic pregnancies, fallopian tubes, conception, fertilisation, foetus.

Now, in the shrivelled, desiccated state of the political realm, a new language has taken hold. That so much of what passes for political debate is now conducted through the medium of sporting analogies is a sure sign of trouble.

When Bertie Ahern wants to be seen as a man of the people he doesn't stop Charlie McCreevy piling yet more favours onto the broad shoulders of the rich, as he did with last week's outbreak of generosity to those who have share options, building land and money to save. He slopes off to Croke Park or Old Trafford or perches himself on the new Jordan grand prix racing car.

When Michael Noonan wants to assure us of his determination to provide stiff opposition to the Government, as when he announced his front bench last week, he runs on to the metaphorical field of play and fires off a barrage of sporting metaphors. He will play hardball. He will man-mark Bertie. He will "continue running as fast as I can". He describes the Government as "a lot like an unfit team that had been winning for a long time. They think all they have to do is trot out on the pitch and they'll win again.

"I think when we start running them around - as we have begun to do now in the order of business in the last few days - and when we get the cabinets in place and the cabinets focused on the ministers, I think the general lack of fitness in this particular team will become apparent and we will wonder have they got a full match in them."

When Mary Harney wants to smooth over any concerns about the handling of the EU's reprimand of Charlie McCreevy's economic policies, she asks her listeners to transform themselves from intelligent, informed citizens to raucous fans screaming for their side or hyped-up players putting the boot into the opposition: "I hope everyone wears the green jersey on this and stands together to defend our economic success."

The evocation of sport in politics is not new. Sporting prowess, and the admiration it rightly inspires, has long been the spark for a political career. The path to office of Jack Lynch, John Wilson, Dick Spring and current TDs like Liam Lawlor and Jimmy Deenihan was opened by reputations won on the field of play. Some or all of those men might well have gone into politics anyway, but the image of being a winner did their careers no harm.

The big difference, though, is that things have now been turned upside down. It used to be that the athlete going into politics was gaining prestige. The sporting past was a steppingstone into a new and more important arena. Jack Lynch didn't talk in hurling metaphors. Dick Spring didn't rely on rugby-speak. Because politics was a higher calling than sport, the person who made the transition didn't have to keep appealing to their former glories on the pitch.

Now, with the decline of politics, the process has been reversed. Instead of sportsmen using their fame as a way into politics, the politicians are desperately trying to attach themselves to the glamour, the passion, and the fraternity of sport. They have so little faith in the power of their own calling to inspire loyalty, to lift hearts, to generate a sense of togetherness, that they are trying to import these qualities from Old Trafford, Croke Park and Lansdowne Road.

Apart from the generation of banalities and cliches, this habit of mind is also worrying. It is not for nothing that sport is the last refuge of political scoundrels. Think of Charlie Haughey powering his way onto the podium to steal a share of Stephen Roche's Tour de France glory. Of Silvio Berlusconi's ability to use his ownership of AC Milan to lever himself into the office of prime minister in Italy. Of the way the prominence of Bernard Tapie, the sleazy owner of Marseilles football club, came to symbolise the corruption of the Mitterrand regime in France. Of the use of football clubs by the Milosevic and Tudjman regimes in Serbia and Croatia as ideological battering rams against the remnants of civic democracy.

THE pleasure, and the social importance, of sport is precisely that it allows us to sublimate emotions that are inappropriate and dangerous in the political sphere. The way we see the world when we are players or fans - them and us, winners and losers, absolute loyalty to our side, hatred of the opposition, the exaltation of the strong and contempt for the weak - is the utter opposite to the way we must see it when we are citizens of a democracy.

When democratic politicians try to hide their own nakedness in a sports shirt they are merely drawing attention to their lack of proper clothes. And they no more invigorate politics by doing so than a slob who buys a Manchester United shirt becomes Roy Keane.

fotoole@irish-times.ie